May, 2013

It’s an odd day today – and also palindromic 31/5/13. Assuming you write the date that way around, of course. Any questions? Anything on your mind? Just give me a shout below and I’ll get back to you with as good an answer as I can!

It’s the awkward third episode! In which… @sr_cav (who is Cav in real life) is nice about us on his blog Dave meets Art Benjamin Art Benjamin’s TED talks about mathemagic and statistics Rüdiger Gamm’s mental arithmetic Secrets of the mathematical ninja Colin invites you to MathsJam – Yarnfield Park,

A reader asks: how do I figure out the volume of soil I need to fill a flowerpot? A flowerpot is a slightly peculiar shape: it’s not a cone, it’s not a cylinder, it’s somewhere between the two. Luckily, we have a word for such shapes: it’s a frustum of

A Mathematical Ninja? Surely Nightingale was just a nurse? Wandering about with a lamp? Well, no. For several reasons, no. First up: there’s no such thing as ‘just a nurse’. Especially not in the crowded field hospitals of the Crimea. More to the point, Nightingale was a leading light1 in

This came up in class, and took me several attempts, so I thought I’d share it. The question asks about an ellipse with equation $9x^2 + 25y^2 = 225$, with foci $A$ and $B$ at $(\pm4,0)$ – the challenge is to prove that the normal to the ellipse at a

While writing an obituary for George Box, I stumbled on something I thought was ingenious: a method for generating independent pairs of numbers drawn from the normal distribution. I’ll concede: that’s not necessarily something that makes the average reader-in-the-street stop in their tracks and say “Wow!” In honesty, it would